The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism

As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.